It's official!

Now that I have told my grandmother, I can let those of you surfing the blogosphere, I have settled on a name for the boat.  The Boat Formerly Known as Bird Shaman is now Lady Lucile.  I will have to do a re-christening ceremony, but I have at least settled it in my own mind.

In other news, I got some plumbing stuff done on the boat, and found some through deck fittings that are no longer good (read: fell apart in my hands).  I did not get a ton done because I had to get back to coaching high school sailing this week.  More coming next weekend. 

Dingy in a half shell, DINGY POWER!!!

 This was the major project yesterday.  I split my one of three made dingy into two separate pieces.  Why you ask?  Two reasons: It weighs 16 tons, and the pieces were separating anyway from 20 years of sitting on a beach.  I figured, what the heck, I'll split the pieces and see what is up.  You can see the result to the left.  What is very neat about this dingy is how much flotation there is in the boat.  I was to say it's unsinkable, but we all know what happened to the Titanic.  Instead, I think I shall say it is mighty difficult to sink.  All of the spaces between the two halves are filled with foam of both the spray in type and the hard block type.  That makes for a lot of floatation in a small dingy. 

 What you have to the left is a picture of ants.  Yes, ants in the fiberglass dingy.  A whole colony of them.  This was part of the reason for the weight.  Not because ants are heavy, but because they had tracked in LOTS of earth with them. 






Some of the earth was from the transom board that was soaking wet and full of holes from the ants feasting their way though it.  When I grabbed on to the board, if fell apart in my hands.  That was one of the sources of weight, as a waterlogged board is quite heavy.  The dingy (Im thinking about calling it Half-shell) will need some minor work and a set of oar locks to be useable.  Other than that, this is looking like a really great 2nd rescue and free dingy!

Hey Spring, I'm ready when you are!

 Non- Half-shell Adventures

 No surprise here, I did more painting.  I looked into getting marine grade alkyd paint, and it looks like so long as I prepare the fiberglass correctly, it does not matter if I use marine grade oil based paint or use exterior quality oil based paint.  They are pretty much the same stuff, other than the price associated with them.  With that being the case, I went to town on the main hatch to finish the primer base, as well as the lazarette hatches. 

Before I started priming the lazarette hatches, I had to trim them.  They were slightly too wide to fit into the cockpit benches.  I got the trusty angle grinder out and carnage ensued.  I could have gone with a sander, or something similar, but I wanted FAST!!!  The angle grinder accomplishes FAST!!! like you would not believe.  Because I have used it a lot for both glass and non-glass projects, I felt comfortable using it.  With glass projects, if you are not careful, it is VERY VERY VERY easy to slip or not pay attention for a split second and take way too much material off.  When you do that, either you leave it as is, or you go back and fill in the mistake and start the sanding process all over again.  Fortunately, I did not make any mistakes with the grinder, so I could go straight to priming.

SEACOCKS

While I was waiting for paint to dry, I figured I could work on the seacocks that my dad had unfrozen during the week.  They had been so corroded that I actually broke one of the through hull fittings off when I tried to open/close the valve inside.  Ooops.  While I am not thrilled about using these traditional tapered barrel type seacocks, I have them, and after a $30 tub of lube, they function quite well.  If I were to replace them with new bronze seacocks, I would have to spend many hundreds (maybe over one thousand) of dollars to replace the 4 that I need.  Two are still on the boat, as I did not want to mess with them since they are in a tough to reach location.  The plan for today is to see if I can get them apart and rebuilt.  The other plan for today is to see if I can re-tube all of the fittings that drain out of through hull fittings.  Some of them leak, and most are brittle at best.  That is a combination for a sunken ship, which I am trying to avoid at all costs!

I'm On The HOOK!!!!

That's right, I have secured myself a mooring for the season.  While I was hoping to be a little closer to Portland, Brunswick is nice, and I do not know that much about Brunswick, so it can be something more to adventure and blog about!!! 

Now that I have the mooring, I now have to get the boat ready to go.  There's still so much to do.  And so much to buy.  CRAP!!!!!


On a totally random note, I really appreciate that I have a really international audience.  I'm not talking just people I know in places like Canada, Russia, and Tonga.  I have had some views from Taiwan, India, Latvia, Lithuania, and some others!  I do not think that I know anyone in those places, and it is really exciting to me that people are finding the blog on the interwebs!

Sawdust, resin, and paint fumes.....

The unfortunate truth is that I really did not get much accomplished this weekend.  Fortunately, I have been catching up on some sleep, talking to people about things I need for the boat, and in general spending time thinking and trying to prioritize what needs to get done to get the boat in the water!!!!

LAST WEEKEND!!

Last weekend I built yet another hatch (foredeck hatch).  I also made some serious progress on the main hatch.  The main hatch you've seen me standing on.  While it is strong enough without glass, I decided that I needed to glass it for the waterproofing nature of fiberglass, as well as adding strength without too much weight.  

The first thing to get accomplished before the glassing began was to remove the cross piece from the hatch that had been glued into place.  My dad has been so eager to help, he took care of this for me during the week.  It was not exactly a clean separation, but what do you expect with high quality wood glue?  The reason the crosspiece needed to be separated before glassing is this: I do not have the hands of a professional fiberglass tech, so I would have ended up glassing it into place, on top of it already being glued into place. 

 The next order of business was to round all of the corners on the hatch.  I might have mentioned this before, but glass does not like to conform to sharp angles.  By taking a belt sander to all of the edges, I was able to achieve a nice gentle curve for the glass to follow.  The other bonus of doing this is that when the glass hardens, it will have a nice curved edge, which will look really nice. 

Finally I was ready to glass.  I was going to do one layer, let it cure, and then move on to the consecutive layers.  I don't know why I thought that was going to be a good idea, since it just meant a lot more work.  It ended up not happening because I did not have a big enough container to mix resin in.  If you mix too big a batch of resin, sometimes it will start to set WAY TOO SOON!  When I got the first batch mixed up and started wetting out the glass, I realized I did not have quite enough.  I had to mix another batch, and so I did.  I then had a lot left over, so moved onto the next layer of glass (or mat in this case).  Again I ended up with not quite enough resin, so I kept going.  The third batch of resin and layer of glass went on.  As it turned out, I had to make another small batch to finish up the third layer, but looking back, I think I went about doing it in the quickest, most efficient way (read: all at once).

Sometimes you end up with imperfections in your glass work.  It is a pain, because you have to go back and fix them.  Unfortunately, I did not see this one until after it had cured.  If I had spotted it before it cured, I might have been able to get the air bubble out of the glass layers.

 This weekend I got some Alkyd primer on the underside of the hatch.  Alkyd paint is an oil based paint.  It is generally what they use on boat interiors because it repels water, oil, grease, etc.  This was yet another tip I picked up from Don Casey in This Old Boat.  I am going to try to get exterior grade Alkyd paint, rather than marine grade, because it is basically the same paint, but the can with a boat on it has a serious markup on it!  I might have to spend the bucks on a marine grade primer for the fiberglass parts I am going to paint, like the hatch tops and bilge. 

YET ANOTHER HATCH

Just building hatches for the boat has been a huge project.  Luckily the foredeck hatch is simple.  It was not to be curved, and it was going to be made even more robustly than the main hatch.  The reason for the simplicity and beefy construction is because this hatch, being on the foredeck, has the potential to take green water.  For you landlubbers, when I boat takes on green water, it means that a wave has broken onto the boat's deck.  Think about the force of waves at the beach.  They are remorseless when it come to anything.  I would like to think the hatch I have built will stand up to green water, but who knows.  Hopefully I will never have to find out.

 The previous hatch never had a good seal, meaning that should there have been any kind of water taken over the bow, it most likely found its way into the forward cabin. I do not want this to happen.  Unfortunately because I am using free wood to build it, the wood is in less than stellar condition.  Some of the boards were cracking.  I took some glue and forced it into the cracks and clamped the crap out of the boards.  You might think that this is overkill, since none of the cracks when all the way through the boards.  You will see the method to the madness in a second.  

 Have you ever heard of a dado?  I had not heard of one either until working on this project.  It is a blade set used in a table saw to cut a groove in wood, much like a router would.  By using the table saw and a dado, we were able to achieve very straight cuts, which is important to getting a good seal on the inner lip of the hatch. 

 This is the result of using the dado.  We had to use 2 passes to get the right width.  With the mitered corners, the grooves matched up quite well.  The boards were not exactly the same widths, so there is a little variation, but nothing major. 

 The final component to making the hatch was to attach the plywood top to the hatch.  Instead of using 2 layers of 5mm plywood, like the main hatch used, I went with a piece of 1/2 inch marine grade plywood left over from the bulkhead project.  Remember that project?  Yes, I will be getting back to that once the hatches are done, and no, it is not done yet.  The forward hatch will be glassed, but like the main hatch, I wanted to check that it had not been screwed up somehow before putting the time and money into glassing it.  

Today's plan is to run around to a few marinas and chat with them about moorings for the summer.  It is crunch time for getting something secured for the summer.  With the weather warming up (well, kinda.... we got snow this week....), others are thinking about their boats and mooring/docking arrangements, so it makes it crunch time for me.  I also hope to get out on the motorcycle today, even though its going to be a bit chilly (only about 50 degrees F). 

   

Musings from another time and place!

I have noticed some traffic on an old blog I had that was part of an independent study course that I set up for myself when I was studying abroad in Russia.  The course ended up being somewhat of a failure, as my Russian was not so great, and I did not get to really appreciate a lot of the museums I went to because I could not read about what I was seeing.  On the other hand, there is quite a lot about my cultural impressions from my time there and chats with friends and teachers about Russia vs. America in terms of politics, culture, religion, etc.  If you are interested in reading some about my experiences in Russia, feel free to check out the blog.  I do have to note, I was much more idealistic about the world and politics in particular than I am now.  That idealism really shows though. 

Peter the Great in St. Petersburg

St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow

Russian Maritime Museum in St. Petersburg (Yes, I was boat obsessed then too!)

Fountain at the Summer Palace outside St. Petersburg

Another time and place blog.

Bye Bye Boat House!

I'm sad to see The Boat House close, as they were so good to us at summer camp in terms of getting us parts, deals on boats, and in general just being great people.  I've bought things from them in the past, but never like this.  They are having a blowout sale, and with just about everything 70% off, its going to make hitting my budget targets a little easier.  Unfortunately, with everything 70% off, it also makes me want to buy things that I WANT rather than NEED.  To be honest, some of the things that I got I could have done without, but most of the things that I did get are mostly based on safety and meeting US Coast Guard regulations.  For example, I got flares that won't expire til 2015, throw-able Type IV flotation aids, and air horns.  A lot of the other things are parts and repair related.  For example, shackles, cotter pins, ring-dings, fiberglass mat, and waxed whipping twine. 

BUILDING

Okay, so now that I have justified buying a boat load of stuff, here is what I have accomplished on the hatch project. Here is one of the lazarette hatches in place on the boat.  It is a little tough to see in the photo, but it over hangs the cockpit bench by over an inch, because I forgot to account for the hinge and spacer that came off of the previous hatch.  It is okay, though, because its only fiberglass and can be cut and re-glassed and be as good as new.  It is more work than I wanted to do, but that is what I get for not totally thinking out the entire project before jumping in and getting something done.

Once the hatch has been cut and re-glassed, it will look great.  I do need to clean up the cockpit and deck, but there are more important things to do at the moment than worry about how clean the outside of the boat is.  On the shakedown cruise, I can just take a 5 gallon bucket and fill it with sea water, and scrub the decks then. 

Two weeks ago, my dad and I built the main hatch for the companionway.  It had not occurred to me just how difficult it was going to be to build the hatch from measurements taken without really having a plan on how to construct the hatch in the first place.  What compounded the issue is that my dad's shop is about 50 miles from where the boat is.  I think it is also important to look at what we started with when working on a big project.  To the right is the hatch that came off the boat.  As you can see, is was beyond useable.  It literally fell apart when I tried to open it last October when trying to decide if I was going to get the boat.  Some days I think that I should have taken things like with a heavier grain of salt.  On the other hand, I have been dreaming of owning my own boat for years, so jumping in over my head was probably the only way it was actually going to happen. 

We started with building a frame out of spruce that I got for free from the abandoned building a few months ago.  Spruce is really strong because of it's long grain structure, so was used a lot for building airplanes before they all went to aluminum frames and skins.  It is also quite light in weight for its size.  All told, the hatch (before fiber glassing) only weighs about 15-20 pounds.  That included the two layers of plywood that cover the frame top and the hardware. 

The previous hatch was flat, so it therefore did not shed water. I did not want to go through the entire process of building a hatch to have it rot because of standing water.  We cut a curve into the cross pieces to give a one inch rise to the center of the hatch.  This should be more than enough to shed water, but to be on the safe side, the hatch will also be covered in fiberglass to make sure that the water does not penetrate though and rot the wood. 

When I was on the boat a few weeks ago, I was crawling all over the place trying to get a second tarp in place, as the first is very Pope-like, and no longer sheds water thoroughly.  At some point I crawled over the cabin top where the main hatch slide, and the whole cabin top flexed significantly under my weight.  I knew then why one of the rails had broken away from the cabin top, and also realized that I needed to make a hatch that could actually stand up to being stood on.  If the hatch can take 200ish pounds standing on it before being glassed, I would have to say that I did a good job making a strong hatch.  And yes, I am actually standing on the hatch, I was NOT photoshopped in. 

FITTING

The next step in the process was to see if the hatch that was built actually fit.  The initial verdict was no.  I am usually not one to be dissuaded from something that I have already works so hard on, so out came the power tools, the sharpies, and the brain power, and the trimming began.  It was not the prettiest fitting job that anyone has done, but it at least got the job done so that the hatch can slide most of the way into place, but I will get to that in a minute.  For the first try, the hatch would not even slide onto the rails.  I had not realized the optical illusion the that curved cabin top had played on me. The outside edges of the rail are angled, not perfectly vertical.  The sides of the frame ARE perfectly vertical, and so the bottom edges had to be cut away.  I bent a blade to my reciprocating saw, but that is okay.  I had no other means to trim the hatch, so a bent blade is an acceptable cost of getting the job done.  When I get up to the shop this weekend, I will be able to sand the cuts smooth, instead of the rough hack job they are currently. 

 Once I could slide the hatch onto the rails, I found out the the measurements I had taken for the forward most cross piece had been off.  You can see the sharpie marks from me trying to trace myself a line to follow with the saw.  I did not want to take off too much material, because once you cut it, its gone, which is why I had several lines.  I could take off a bit, fit it again, and see how much more I had to take off. 




Jenny took this picture of the triumph of getting the hatch on the boat.  Here is the sticky part: I also did not account for the lip of the companionway being curved with the rest of the cabin top.  This is actually a good thing.  It means that I can take the aft most crosspiece out, and because it does not clear the companionway lip, it will not slide off forward.  What sucks is that I glued the crosspiece into place.  I have to figure out how to un-glue waterproof wood glue.  It might be time to break out the chisel.   To be honest though, I am really excited to have hatches that are going together quite well, even without being able to test them immediately on the boat.  With all projects there are hiccups, and lets be honest, how else am I going to learn????